Analysis of Proposed
Senate Election Law & Municipal Affairs
NH Senate Map SB 240, as Amended (0565S)
updated March 27, 2022
What is this document?
Community of Interest (COI) Communities of interest can take many forms, but generally refer to groups of people united by shared interests. In the context of redistricting, communities of interest are those communities that share policy concerns, such as similar economic interests, a shared school system, or common resources. Our maps use boundaries of shared high school districts, shared water systems, and shared police and fire protection -- in addition to the boundaries of towns and city wards-- to inform the redistricting process. More information about communities of interest can be found by visiting NYU’s Brennan Center
Compactness Compactness helps us measure the cohesiveness of a district. When drawing districts to represent a region, it is best practice to strive for a compact district, since non-compact districts are less likely to share communities of interests (2010’s Executive Council & some 2020 NH Senate districts), and the wider area makes it harder for representatives to understand and serve the needs of constituents. Compactness is also used as a check against gerrymandering (see below), since gerrymandered districts tend to not be compact. The compactness scores reported in our analysis come from the DRA compactness calculation described here:
Contiguity Contiguity describes how municipalities in a voting district are geographically connected to each other. Contiguous districts are a requirement for all legislative districts in New Hampshire. This definition is sometimes stretched -- quite literally -- with the towns of Meredith and Gilford only connected in the middle of Lake Winnipesaukee, the towns of Strafford and New Durham connected in an inaccessible point in the woods, and the 2010 floterial district, Grafton 9, for which the elected rep has to travel out of the district to get to constituents on the other side of the district.
Dave’s Redistricting Application (DRA) Dave’s Redistricting Application, hosted at https://davesredistricting.org is a free online tool for creating, viewing, sharing, and analyzing redistricting maps. The mission of Dave’s Redistricting is to, “empower civic organizations and citizen activists to advocate for fair congressional and egislative districts and increased transparency in the redistricting process.” Map-a-Thon’s maps and most supporting data are located there for public inspection.
Deviation Deviation refers to the degree to which districts have equal population. Ideally, every representative or other elected official in proportional representation will represent the same number of people, but a small amount of flexibility --deviation-- is permissible to account for unequal population distributions and compliance with other laws, such as the 1965 Voting Rights Act or the New Hampshire Constitution’s mandate to keep town boundaries intact, and NH Supreme Court Rulings
Gerrymandering Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing district boundaries for partisan advantage. This leads to uncompetitive general elections and districts oriented toward party agendas rather than local interests. Gerrymandered districts often connect regions with little in common, leading to the splitting of cities, counties, and other communities of interest. The leading example of this in New Hampshire is 2010’s Executive Council 2 and certain NH Senate districts
Splitting Because our maps are drawn with the goal of avoiding gerrymandering while keeping communities of interest intact, many parts of our analysis examine the number of communities of interest divided, or “splits,” contained within a district. The ideal map minimizes the number of districts which cross other administrative boundaries to hold communities of interest intact. Our analyses examine the number of geographical splits necessary. For example, a state senator representing the towns of Dublin and Peterborough would split county lines while keeping a school district intact. Another way of examining splitting is to weight splits by population, the approach taken in the DRA county-splitting metric.
Partisan Lean Number of seats using past election data that are likely to be either Democrat seats, Republican seats, or Competitive seats.
Map-a-Thon Glossary
Takeaways on the NH Senate Proposal
2020 NH Senate Map - Minority Proposal - On table in Senate
2020 NH Senate Map - Majority Proposal passed on Feb 16th
2020 NH Senate Map - Map-a-Thon Proposal
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NH Senate Map-a-Thon Proposal
<<< Map-a-Thon Proposal
Pros:
Cons:
The Map-a-Thon’s Senate map tries to keep Communities of Interest together while also keeping the map competitive and having compact districts. It has the lowest deviation of any of the proposed maps, has the highest compactness score, and only splits 19 High Schools SAUs compared to 28 in the minority proposal and 36 in the Majority proposal.
2020 NH Senate Map - Minority Proposal
<<< Minority Proposal
Pros:
Cons:
The minority’s proposal for the NH Senate is an improvement on the current map but still prioritizes incumbents over Communities of Interest. It keeps Manchester split into 3 districts when it could have 2 districts just on its own. It does however do a better job than the Senate proposal in having competitive districts, compact districts, and doesn’t split as many High School SAUs.
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2020 NH Senate Map - Senate Proposal passed on Feb 16th
<<< Senate Proposal
Pros:
Cons:
The 2010 Executive Council map generally garners most of the attention in being a gerrymandered map in NH, but the 2010 NH Senate map wasn’t much better. This 2020 proposed map makes the map worse. It packs Democrats into 9 districts (4, 5, 10, 13, 15, 18, 20, 21, and 24) while cracking them in the remaining 15. This leads to a very lopsided map. With a nearly 50/50 vote in 2020, this map would have yielded a 15/9 majority for Republicans.
This map keeps most of the incumbent Senators in their districts and only makes small adjustments to make them safer. It does not take any Communities of interest into account; an example of which is District 9, stretching over halfway across the state from Hinsdale to Bedford, crossing 9 different High School SAUs. In total, the map splits 36 High School SAUs, and needlessly splits Coos County.
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2010 Senate Map
2020 Senate Map Least Changed
2010 NH Senate Map
2020 NH Senate Map - Least Changed
Did the changes made by the Majority need to be made?
2020 NH Senate Map - Majority Proposal
2020 Proposed Senate Map
Comparison of predicted district partisan lean using 2020 NH Senate elections results, which yielded an extremely competitive state level two-party vote share of 49.8% Democrat and 50.2% Republican.
District seats are assigned ‘Lean Dem’, ‘Lean Rep’, or ‘Competitive’ depending on whether the predicted Democrat vote share is >55%, the predicted Republican vote share is >55%, or neither party is predicted >55% vote share, respectively (see previous slides for detailed assessment). Given the extremely competitive state level vote share, a representation map would be expected to either have a relatively even distribution of party lean among districts, or a relatively even distribution of party leaning and competitive districts.
Our prediction, tabulated below, indicates that the minority proposal deviates least, while the Senate proposal deviates most, from this ‘ideal’ voter representation.
Partisan Lean for Proposed NH Senate Maps
Note: The ‘Lean Dem’ and ‘Lean Rep’ seat count in this table correlates to the number of ‘blue’ and ‘red’ highlighted districts in the previous detailed slides, respectively. The ‘Competitive’ seat count correlates with districts in the previous slides that were not highlighted, i.e. did not have a ‘strong’ partisan lean.
Frequently-asked Questions
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About the Map-a-Thon:
https://www.opendemocracynh.org/nh_map_a_thon
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Download our previously-released analysis on NH House and Congressional maps:
https://www.opendemocracyaction.org/maps